About Me

Known principally for his weekly political columns and his commentaries on radio and television, Chris Trotter has spent most of his adult life either engaging in or writing about politics. He was the founding editor of The New Zealand Political Review (1992-2005) and in 2007 authored No Left Turn, a political history of New Zealand. Living in Auckland with his wife and daughter, Chris describes himself as an “Old New Zealander” – i.e. someone who remembers what the country was like before Rogernomics. He has created this blog as an archive for his published work and an outlet for his more elegiac musings. It takes its name from Bowalley Road, which runs past the North Otago farm where he spent the first nine years of his life. Enjoy.

Bowalley Road Rules

The blogosphere tends to be a very noisy, and all-too-often a very abusive, place. I intend Bowalley Road to be a much quieter, and certainly a more respectful, place.So, if you wish your comments to survive the moderation process, you will have to follow the Bowalley Road Rules.These are based on two very simple principles:Courtesy and Respect.Comments which are defamatory, vituperative, snide or hurtful will be removed, and the commentators responsible permanently banned.Anonymous comments will not be published. Real names are preferred. If this is not possible, however, commentators are asked to use a consistent pseudonym.Comments which are thoughtful, witty, creative and stimulating will be most welcome, becoming a permanent part of the Bowalley Road discourse.However, I do add this warning. If the blog seems in danger of being over-run by the usual far-Right suspects, I reserve the right to simply disable the Comments function, and will keep it that way until the perpetrators find somewhere more appropriate to vent their collective spleen.

Followers

Wednesday, 26 November 2008

Adios Agenda

AND the beat goes on. One by one the last vestiges of intelligent, democratically-engaged public broadcasting are driven off the air.

The latest casualty, Richard Harman’s excellent current affairs programme, Agenda, was the last long-format political interview show on New Zealand television. Even more importantly, it was the last current affairs show dedicated to the democratic objective of holding our political leaders to account, and to exploring in depth the major issues confronting the electorate.

Harman’s company Front Page Limited, which produced Agenda, also acted as a training-ground where young journalists could learn the essence of current affairs broadcasting from one of its acknowledged masters.

It was David Lange who memorably quipped that to carry any idea in the New Zealand of the 1980s you first had to carry the "Three Dicks" – Richard Harman (TVNZ’s political editor) Richard Griffin (Radio NZ’s political editor) and Richard Long (editor of The Dominion).

These were men who revelled in unravelling the intricacies of our daily politics, and who understood that the political journalist plays a role in the democratic process which is absolutely essential to the preservation of an informed and engaged citizenry.

TVNZ is reported as saying it wants to take the production of Agenda’s ultimate replacement in-house. We can only imagine what this might mean.

My money is on a half-hour format, once-over-lightly, personality- (rather than policy-) focused programme, with an emphasis on the "human aspects" of our political life, and where the mood is light-hearted, "ironic", and aimed (like everything else produced at TVNZ) at entertaining 20-30 year-olds.

It means that Agenda’s replacement will end up being Generation X’s revenge upon the ageing Baby-Boom generation. Where the Harmans and the Griffins and the Longs strove to reflect the importance of political decisions to the daily lives of their fellow New Zealanders, their more youthful successors will paint a picture of New Zealand politics that entertainingly confirms all the worst prejudices of a cynical and increasingly dumbed-down electorate. Where Agenda sought to engage, expose and explain, its Gen-X-produced replacement will seek to decode, deflate and deconstruct.

From the modernist imperative, which sought to subject the world to the critical analysis of a teleologically-driven everyman, we will be required to endure the ironic detachment and ideological disengagement of post-modern political dilettantism.

Old New Zealanders will at least have a memory of what real current affairs journalism looks and sounds like (think Brian Edwards, Ian Fraser, Lindsay Perigo, Kim Hill). In a very few years New New Zealanders won’t even be able to explain the concept.

Because, when all is said and done, you don’t know what you don’t know – and that’s obviously the way TVNZ intends to keep it.

8 comments:

I wonder if your lament for the demise of the fourth estate isn't several years late Chris? I'm unable to watch Agenda but recall very little critical analysis on TV from when I last lived in NZ. Contrast this with Four Corners in Australia and the picture is more grim. I guess don't expect TV or newspapers to critique policy any longer, it's long ago abandoned the market in preference for prurience and trivia - witness the criticism of Bronagh Key's dress sense by the Herald on Sunday. Also, I'm not so worried about the Gen Xers influence, I am one however so this might discount my insights; just look at your blogrole, there's plenty of very clever critical commentary here and most of this mob aren't boomers, they might even be Y's.

...with a general de-emphasis on anything of substance, my bet is that we will see a satirical prime time programme with "spitting image" masks. The main target will be of course the incumbent. A great pity that such a show wasn't on air during Helen's reign...the possibilities for good satire have evaded us, Mr and Mrs Davis at home for example, but attempted humiliation of JK and Rodney Hide will have to suffice...

i really miss kim hill on tv. she was brilliant at asking the difficult questions and pushing for answers. i saw her at the radio nz debate in hamilton during the campaign. she reiterated that she just wasn't interested in the tv interviews anymore. sigh. i also loved the fact that she was a successful older woman on tv. we have so few of those left.

Isn't it great that National has committed to freeing up charter funding then? Clearly, the charter is meaningless and the dual mandate has failed. I look forward to TV3 picking up Agenda in the future.

I don't think this is a sign that public service television is dead. Fortunately, there are signs of a revitalisation of this genre from the margins of television.

I was losing interest in Agenda over recent months, feeling it had become a shadow of the way it was in better days. It seemed to have become dominated by fairly conservative white men on its panel and with its interviewer/s. Guyon Espiner is too light weight for such a forum. This format is in need of being re-vitalised, and I see no reason why TV One (or any other FTA channel) shouldn't develop a new version.

At the moment there is better current affairs interrogation on Maori TV's Native Affairs. And there are some innovative new programmes emerging on TVNZ7 on Freeview. I hope the National-led government doesn't put any barriers in the way of the nurturing of such programmes and other new initiatives.

There's a vitality and a bit of edginess in the TVNZ7 programmes Backbenches & Media7, which owes a lot to their multi-platform production and delivery. On limited budgets, they make very good use of current ditigal technologies and the interaction between various audience access points. So they are recorded with a live audience and are available on both freeview and the internet.

They also bring in more direct interaction between the panelists and audiences, especially on Backbenches. There's been some really timely critiques on Media7. eg the one in which they critiqued media coverage of crime, crime statistics and crime research; and on the edition that picked up on David Beatson's reports on the Pundit website, critiquing NZ's involvement in Afghanistan and (lack of) media coverage of it.

The pity is that such programmes are still very much on the margins, and don't get wider coverage (especially the Media7 programme on crime during the election).

Unfortunately I wouldn't hold my breath waiting of NACT to nurture the devlopment of such programming. The TVNZ7 & Native Affairs programmes provide the kind of debates and critique that enable democracy to thrive, and is best placed within a public service ethos rather than in a highly commercialised context. Hopefully if enough people demand the development of such public service initiatives they will get more take-up on TV.